Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The more things change for the Scuderia, the more they remain the same
Things are never dull in Formula 1.
This was supposed to be a quiet week off, following a back-to-back in Austria and Britain, and ahead of another back-to-back in Hungary and the Netherlands. But a thunderbolt from the clouds came down on Monday, with the shocking news that Daniel Ricciardo was coming back to the grid.
After just ten races, AlphaTauri and Red Bull had seen enough from Nyck de Vries. The rookie was out, and Ricciardo was in, on loan to AlphaTauri starting with the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Still, with F1 on a bye week following the British Grand Prix it is time to take stock of just where each of the ten teams are ahead of Budapest. Working through the field from the bottom of the Constructors’ standings to the top, what is the biggest question facing each team right now?
The next team up on our virtual grid lock?
Ferrari.
Has anything really changed?
Photo by Gongora/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Midway through the British GP, the messages started rolling in.
They came from Ferrari fans, non-Ferrari fans, and even just fans of motorsport. All with a general theme.
“How does Ferrari keep screwing up?”
“Incompetence” was a very common word. “Nothing has changed,” was a common lament.
And then came one message which — and I’m paraphrasing here as this is a family website after all — that simply read something to the effect of “I hate them so … much.”
But you can understand why.
After a year in which strategic blunders saw Ferrari give up an early-season lead, and cost former Team Principal Mattia Binotto his job, Ferrari seems to be floundering once more. At qualifying for the Canadian Grand Prix, for example, Charles Leclerc wanted to make the move to slicks, while the team wanted him to stay on the track and post a banker lap in the wet conditions on the intermediates. The result? Leclerc switched to slicks too late to get them up to temperature, and he failed to advance to Q3.
Following qualifying, Leclerc was frustrated, to say the least.
“When the track is so dry and we are staying on intermediates, we are not making our life any easier,” Leclerc lamented to Sky Sports F1.
“We will discuss with the team but it’s not the first time it’s happened. We are quite often on the wrong side of making those decisions in those tricky situations,” he continued. “Again, we are just making our life way too difficult. I will manage it myself internally and I don’t want to say what will happen but there will be a talk and analysis. Hopefully we can come back stronger from it because it’s been quite a few times now.”
It was teammate Carlos Sainz Jr.’s turn to be frustrated in the following race. Sainz scored his first podium of the season with a third-place finish during the Sprint race, but missed out on a podium that Sunday. Early in the Austrian Grand Prix Sainz was running behind Leclerc, but felt he was the faster of the two cars and should be let through.
Instead he was instructed to hold behind Leclerc, and eventually was forced to double-stack behind this teammate in the pits.
Sainz ultimately finished fourth — and was dropped to sixth after post-race penalties — while Leclerc went on to a podium finish.
“The gap went from four tenths because I was on his [Leclerc’s] gearbox, to six or seven seconds and three positions lost in that first pit stop,” Sainz explained to Sky Sports F1.
“I feel I played the team game, staying behind and to be penalised in the way I was with the pit stop, losing a lot of time and losing the three positions and six seconds with the [virtual safety car] ending, when we could have done something differently frustrated me,” added the Ferrari driver.
“I don’t want to say that I am owed,” continued Sainz. “I do the best job I can, I’m in a very good moment, I’m driving very well and very fast each weekend. Doing some good overtaking and defending today and that’s why I’m frustrated by the result.”
While both Team Principal Frederic Vasseur as well as Leclerc praised Sainz for his effort, it was clear the driver was frustrated with the strategy calls.
Then in Silverstone, the team wanted to push for a one-stop strategy but ended up bringing both Leclerc and teammate Carlos Sainz Jr. in earlier than expected for fears of tyre degradation.
That’s when those messages mentioned earlier started rolling in.
It was a conservative decision, made in part because they could not run a practice program with Leclerc on Friday as he dealt with an electrical issue.
“The start of the issue with us was on Friday when Charles wasn’t able to run in FP2 and so we only had a long run on the Soft from which we had concerns about degradation,” said Vasseur after the race. “That’s why we decided to go with Medium-Hard, which proved to be too conservative a choice as the degradation was lower than expected.”
Leclerc ended up making a pair of stops, while Sainz did pull off the one-stop strategy. Still, it was not enough, as they settled for a P9 and a P10.
In a sport filled with pressure cookers, Ferrari is the biggest. Every decision is second-guessed, and expectations are high. But for many fans, what they are seeing feels like “deja vu all over again.”
